Paul Feig Says the Ghostbusters Sequel Isn't Dead

The Ghostbusters reboot had a rough go of it, to say the least. Its first trailer was famously the most disliked YouTube video of all time, and the film received plenty of hate (much of it sexist and/or racist) before it even came out in theaters. After a disappointing run at the box office, the planned sequel seemed very unlikely to happen. But now that the dust has settled, director Paul Feig is still holding out hope that it will get made at some point.

In a new interview with The Daily Beast, Feig said that a sequel is still "up in the air."

"That's up to the studio because they have to pay for it. Nobody's called me," he said. "But I love those characters and I know they are now heroes and mean a lot to a lot of people, so in a perfect world it would be great if we could see them bust more ghosts, kick more ass, and be awesome again."

Since he hasn't heard anything yet, this might sound like wishful thinking, but it's not impossible. The film wasn't a huge success considering that it was supposed to launch a franchise, but it $229 million, it wasn't exactly a flop either. And after all of that bluster, the film received pretty good reviews, garnering a 73% on Rotten Tomatoes. Now that the film is out on home media, it could gain more of an audience based on its quality, separate from all of the negative press.

"Now that the movie's kind of past all that stuff and we're out on DVD and streaming on digital, I get contacted all day long over social media by women thanking me for the movie, and girls and young women sending me pictures of themselves in their modern-day Ghostbusters costumes," said Feig. "I even get tweets from women saying, 'If this movie was around when I was younger I'd maybe be an engineer now, because I see these cool women who are scientists.' So I hope the world will go, wow, we got upset over something that we really didn't need to get upset over. I'm hoping that time will rehabilitate us."

Feig is also hoping that the film's popularity will increase as the general political trends in America change. Judd Apatow once said that most of the Ghostbuster haters were Trump supporters, and Feig agrees that hopefully, both movements are the last dying gasp of retrograde sexist and racist attitudes:

"A lot of the things I hear leveled at Hillary are the things I heard leveled at my movie for two years," said Feig. "I would never be so bold as to say they were all Trump supporters, but it falls in line with the beliefs of some of them, and I would get angry at horrendous tweets and I would go back and see who said it, and a good amount of the time there would be some pro-Trump thing on there. I don't know how to say it, but things always get crazy before they get better. Everybody screams the loudest before the new normal happens, so if this is the death throes of that old way of thinking, then that's great."

There seems to be a lot of truth to this. While some fans disliked the film on its own merits, the vitriolic hatred towards the film—particularly before it came out—was mostly due to sexism, which came to an awful head when Leslie Jones was hacked and received a barrage of online harassment. We can only hope that Kate McKinnon's doppelganger will help to usher in a new climate in which the Ghostbusters sequel won't be nearly as controversial.